A
History of Maple syrup
Maple
syrup:
Canada produces a whopping 85 % of the world’s syrup .Gilbertson
Maple Syrup Producers of Joseph Islands Ontario Canada producer is
one of the largest maple syrup producer in the world
A
History of Maple syrup
No
one is really sure just how long people have been practicing the art
and science of making this wonderful product from the sap of a tree.
However, there are two basic schools of thought about the origin of
maple syrup.
The first group identifies with Canadians legend
and lore that maple syrup and maple sugar was being made before
recorded history. Canadians were the first to discover
'sinzibuckwud', the Algonquin word for maple syrup, meaning literally
'drawn from wood'.
The Native were the first to recognize the
sap as a source of energy and nutrition. They would use their
tomahawks to make V-shaped incisions in the trees. Then, they would
insert reeds or concave pieces of bark to run the sap into buckets
made from birch bark. Due to the lack of proper equipment, the sap
was slightly concentrated either by throwing hot stones in the
bucket, or by leaving it overnight and disposing with the layer of
ice out which had formed on top. It was drunk as a sweet drink or
used in cooking. It is possible that maple-cured bacon began with
this process.
Before the advent of Europeans, the Natives used
clay pots to boil maple sap over simple fires protected only by a
roof of tree branches. This was the first version of the sugar shack.
Over the years, this evolved to the point where the sugar shack is
not only a place where maple syrup is produced, but also a gathering
place where a traditional meal can be enjoyed.
However, some
historians maintain that the Natives did not have the technology or
tools to perform the necessary boiling of sap to make either product
let alone both.
The first white settlers and fur traders
introduced wooden buckets to the process, as well as iron and copper
kettles. In the early days of colonization, it was the Natives who
showed French settlers how to tap the trunk of a tree at the outset
of spring, harvest the sap and boil it to evaporate some of the
water. This custom quickly became an integral part of colony life and
during the 17th and 18th centuries, syrup was a major source of high
quality pure sugar. Later, however, they would learn to bore holes in
the trees and hang their buckets on home-made spouts.
Maple
Sugar production was especially important due to the fact that other
types of sugar were hard to find and expensive. It was as common on
the table as salt is today.
Even if production methods have
been streamlined since colonial days, they remain basically the same.
The sap must first be collected and distilled carefully so that you
get the same totally natural, totally pure syrup without any chemical
agents or preservatives.
Early maple syrup was made by boiling
40 gallons of sap over an open fire until you had one gallon of
syrup. This was both time consuming and labor intensive, especially
considering that the sap needed to be hauled to the fire in the first
place.
The process underwent little change over the first two
hundred years of recorded maple making. However, Mid 1850's, the tin
can was invented. The tin can was made of sheet metal. It didn’t
take syrup makers long to realize that a large flat sheet metal pan
was more efficient for boiling than a heavy rounded iron kettle which
let much of the heat slide past.
Virtually all syrup makers in
the past were self sufficient dairy farmers who made syrup and sugar
during the off season of the farm for their own use and for extra
income. These farmers were, and continue to be, folks who look at a
process and say to themselves, 'There has to be a faster, more
efficient, easier way to do this.' Then, in approximately 1864, a
Canadian borrowed some design ideas from sorghum evaporators and put
a series of baffles in the flat pans to channel the boiling sap. The
ideas continued to flow. In 1872 a Vermonter developed an evaporator
with two pans and a metal arch or firebox which greatly decreased
boiling time. Seventeen years later, in 1889, another Canadian bent
the tin that formed the bottom of a pan into a series of flues which
increased the heated surface area of the pan and again decreased
boiling time.
For the most part technology stayed at this
point for almost another century, until the 1960’s, when it was no
longer a self sufficient enterprise with large families as farm
hands. Because syrup making is so labuor intensive a farmer could no
longer afford to hire the large crew it would take to gather all the
buckets and haul the sap to the evaporator house. During the energy
crunch of the 1970’s, syrup makers responded with another surge of
technological breakthroughs. Tubing systems, which had been
experimented with since the early part of the century, were perfected
and the sap came directly from the tree to the evaporator house.
Vacuum pumps were added to the tubing systems. Pre-heaters were
developed to "recycle" heat lost in the steam.
Reverse-osmosis filters were developed to take a portion of water out
of the sap before it was boiled. Several producers even obtained
surplus desalinization machines from the U.S. Navy and used them to
take a portion of water out of the sap prior to boiling. In fact, one
is still in use by a producer South-East of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
